Love Quote by Mortimer Adler

Adler is trying to rescue erotic love from the flattering insult of biology. In a culture quick to treat desire as a kind of lightning strike - irrational, involuntary, and only later dressed up as "compatibility" - he insists on a more orderly sequence: first you like someone, then your body follows. The line is deceptively mild, but its intent is polemical. Adler is pushing back against the Freudian and modern consumer assumption that sex is the engine and the person is the accessory.

The key word is "selectivity". Erotic love, in lived experience, is weirdly specific: not just any attractive body will do, and the same person who looks perfect on paper can leave you cold. Adler calls that specificity "intelligible" only if eros is anchored in the particularities of character - the jokes that land, the moral texture, the way someone moves through a room - rather than in raw appetite. He’s arguing that desire is not merely stimulus-response; it’s perception plus judgment.

Subtext: this is also an ethical claim. If liking is primary, then erotic love becomes answerable to reasons. It can be cultivated, disciplined, even criticized; it’s not an alibi for obsession or exploitation. In the mid-century philosophical world Adler inhabited - steeped in Aristotle and the idea that human goods are rationally discussable - that matters. The quote reframes sex not as the enemy of reason, but as something that can be dignified by it: desire as a consequence of recognizing a person, not consuming one.